From Facebook:

Subroto Roy thinks the zenith of US-India relations (besides FDR pressing Churchill on Indian independence) was the landing of US military transports in Ladakh during the Communist Chinese aggression of 1962 thanks to JK Galbraith & JFK. (The nadir was the Nixon-Kissinger support for Pakistani tyranny against Bangladesh in 1971.)

Subroto Roy is afraid he does not think the interests of the common man and woman of India come to be served in the slightest by a fancy dinner-party whether given by the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace for the President of India or by the President of the United States at the White House for the Prime Minister of India….(…though some businessmen and bureaucrats become happy…)

I have had a close interest in China ever since the “Peking Spring” more than thirty years ago (if not from when I gave all my saved pocket money to Nehru in 1962 to fight the Chinese aggression) but I had not published anything relating to China until 2007-2008 when I published the ten articles listed below:

With new tensions on the Tibet-India border apparently being caused by the Chinese military, these may be helpful for India to determine a Plan B, or even a Plan A, in its dealings with Communist China.

If anything, the ten American authors of the 25-pages of the RAND text have among them two prominent advocates of better US-India relations. This is helpful to truthfulness because of the simple fact India has been in this case a victim of aggression that originated in Pakistan. Whether elements of the Pakistan Government were involved is almost the wrong question – if some retired underemployed former soldier drawing a Pakistan Army pension helped the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s commando training of the Mumbai terrorists, the existence of Pakistani state involvement is proved. Commando training requires technical skills of a sort that can only originate with a military.

In Pakistan as in any other large populous country including India, the state tends to be a hydra-headed monster and it may be foolish to imagine instead a rational, unified, well-informed or even a benevolent political entity. State involvement in Pakistan, India, China or elsewhere is something hard to isolate when there is so much mixing of private and public property or misuse of resources arising from the public exchequer.

What Pakistan’s PR campaign has done after Mumbai is not so much raise the Kashmir dispute as to obfuscate things by shedding crocodile tears and pretending to share victimhood saying, oh we sympathise with you but please sympathise with us too as we have been victims of even bigger terrorist attacks by the same kind of people, we have lost Benazir, we have lost many more people than you have, therefore cooperate with us and we will try to do what we can to help you in this matter. English-speaking liberals educated at places like Karachi Grammar School have then appeared on Indian TV stations (owned by Delhi people from places like Doon School) purporting to represent Pakistan on “the Mumbai incident”; none of them can have much credibility because the real India-haters in Pakistan might cheerfully make them murder victims too given half a chance.

The RAND study deserves credit for avoiding all misleading Pakistani rhetoric about the Mumbai massacres and at least intending to try to get to the bottom of things in a systematic manner. Beyond that, unfortunately, it has made logical and factual and methodological errors which cause it to fail to do so.

The key logical error made by the RAND authors arises from combining a central front-page statement

“Evidence suggests Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group based in Pakistan, was responsible for the attack”

with assertive suggestions about Mumbai’s police being backward, incompetent, cowardly etc (“passive”). Yet how precisely did evidence about LeT culpability come to light? Only because Mumbai’s police and the Railway police engaged, injured and then captured Kasab using their antiquated equipment the best they could. There is no evidence of police cowardice at CST Station; to the contrary, it took courage to aim .303’s at adversaries firing back with assault rifles. Kasab received his first hand injury there. ATS Chief Karkare and his fellow-officers may seem foolhardy in hindsight to have been driving in the same vehicle but they did engage their unknown enemy immediately they could and died doing so, crippling Kasab badly enough that he could be captured in due course at Chowpatty. [Correction: it appears that though Kasab was fired upon by the police at CST Station he received both his hand injuries from the firing by the ATS squad.] And the Chowpatty police action showed obvious bravery in absorbing injury and death in order to kill Ishmail and capture Kasab. (Kasab, among the youngest, had been paired with Ishmail, the apparent leader of the group.)

Furthermore, Kasab upon capture was treated humanely and lawfully. His injuries were treated, he was produced before a magistrate within a week who asked him if he was being mistreated to which he said no. Slumdog millionaire may get undeserved Oscars portraying torture of a British actor by Mumbai police but it is ridiculous fiction – Kasab the captured Pakistani terrorist mass murderer was not tortured by Mumbai’s police.

Contrast such Indian police behaviour with the “enhanced interrogation techniques” the Bush Administration used with negative results in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib – which President Obama has now started to end. Kasab, an ignorant misguided youth, was grateful enough for the humane and civilized treatment to start singing like the proverbial canary. The result of that has been precisely all the evidence the Government of India has now presented to the world and Pakistan about the LeT’s culpability.

As for the anti-terrorist actions of the Indian Army, Navy and NSG, the RAND study is right to point to multitudinous errors and it is useful to have these listed in orderly fashion. But many of these errors were obvious to millions of lay Indian citizens who watched events on TV. The central fault was the scarcity of trained NSG officers and men, and the failure to apply standard emergency management protocols.

The RAND study, by relying overly on government sources, has failed to point to what ordinary Indian citizens already know – the NSG is being utterly wasted protecting our politicians. India has no proper equivalent of the US “Secret Service”, and even if we did, we would probably waste that by spreading it too thinly among politicians. As it happens if almost any politician in India today did happen to be unfortunately assassinated, the main mourners would be family-members and not the general Indian public. Despite politicians constituting rather “low-value targets” for terrorists, India’s scarce anti-terrorist and police resources have been misallocated to protecting them.

Finally, the RAND study makes the lazy-man’s methodological error of supposing outfits like the LeT think and behave in a manner explicable by American political science textbooks, or ought to do so. What Western analysts may need to do instead is learn from the old Arabist and Orientalist traditions of how to think and see the world from Eastern points of view. But that may require greater self-knowledge than the modern world tends to permit.

Postscript:

My December 6 2008 analysis here titled “A Quick Comparison Between the September 11 2001 NYC-Washington attacks and the November 26-28 2008 Mumbai Massacres (An Application of the Case-by-Case Philosophical Technique of Wittgenstein, Wisdom and Bambrough)” is republished below. I have corrected “Rome Airport” with “Lod Airport” on the basis of reading the RAND report, though may not have received the courtesy of aknowledement for the reminder of the Japanese Red Army attack.

“In my book Philosophy of Economics (Routledge, 1989) and in my August 24 2004 public lecture in England “Science, Religion, Art and the Necessity of Freedom”, both available elsewhere here, I described the “case-by-case” philosophical technique recommended by Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Wisdom and Renford Bambrough. (Bambrough had also shown a common root in the work of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.) Herewith an application of the technique to a contemporary problem that shows the “family resemblance” between two modern terrorist attacks, the September 11 2001 attack on New York and Washington and the Mumbai massacres last week.

Similarity: In both, a gang of motivated youthful terrorists acted as a team against multiple targets; their willingness to accept suicide while indulging in mass-murder may have, bizarrely enough, brought a sense of adventure and meaning to otherwise empty lives.

Difference: In the 9/11 attacks, Mohammad Atta seemed to have been a single predominant leader while each of the others also had complex active roles requiring decisions, like piloting and navigating hijacked jumbo-jets. In the Mumbai massacres, the training and leadership apparently came from outside the team before and even during the operation – almost as if the team were acting like brainwashed robots under long-distance control.

Similarity: Both attacks required a long prior period of training and planning.

Difference: The 9/11 attacks did not require commando-training imparted by military-style trainers; the Mumbai massacres did.

Difference: In the 9/11 attacks, the actual weapons used initially were primitive, like box-cutters; in the Mumbai massacres, assault rifles and grenades were used along with sophisticated telecommunications equipment.

Difference: In 9/11, the initial targets, the hijacked aircraft, were themselves made into weapons against the ultimate targets, namely the buildings, in a way not seen before. In the Mumbai massacres, mass-shooting of terrorized civilians was hardly something original; besides theatres of war, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Japanese Red Army used these in the 1970s as terrorist techniques (e.g. at Rome Airport Lod Airport; Postscript January 26 2009: I make this correction after reading and commenting on the RAND study which unfortunately did not have the courtesy of acknowledging my December 6 2008 analysis) plus there were, more recently, the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres.

Similarity: In both cases, Hollywood and other movie scripts could have inspired the initial ideas of techniques to be used.

Similarity: In both cases, the weapons used were appropriate to the anticipated state of defence: nothing more than box-cutters could be expected to get by normal airport security; assault rifles etc could come in by the unguarded sea and attack soft targets in Mumbai. (Incidentally, even this elementary example of strategic thinking in a practical situation may be beyond the analytical capacity contained in the tons of waste paper produced at American and other modern university Economics departments under the rubric of “game theory”.)

Similarity: In both cases, a high-level of widespread fear was induced for several days or more within a targeted nation-state by a small number of people.

Similarity: No ransom-like demands were made by the terrorists in either case.

Similarity: Had the single terrorist not been captured alive in the Mumbai massacres, there would have been little trace left by the attackers.

Difference: The 9/11 attackers knew definitely they were on suicide-missions; the Mumbai attackers may not have done and may have imagined an escape route.”

Once upon a time, half a century ago, the son of a Pakistani president married the daughter of an American ambassador to Pakistan and moved to Washington. That might be as good a time as any from which to mark the start of the grip Pakistan’s military and political/bureaucratic elite have managed to have on the process of defining official American policy towards Pakistan and indeed the subcontinent as a whole.

It is hard to find the most simplistic of the statements contained in the document. My runner-up candidate would be the recommendations that what should happen in Pakistan now is

Bravo! What else to say?

My winning candidate for naiveté though must be this on page 16:

“Pakistan… sees itself as the political home for the subcontinent’s Muslim population and believes India’s continued control over the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley and denial of a plebiscite for its inhabitants represent a lingering desire on India’s part to undo the legacy of partition, which divided the British Indian Empire into India and Pakistan.”

How is it possible for four young scholars from places like the Fletcher School to not know this and yet pretend to expertise on Pakistan or the subcontinent? Pakistanis and Indians and Bangladeshis who actually live in Pakistan and India and Bangladesh all know this from mother’s knee. But the powerful Potomac/CFR/Houston etc Pakistan lobby which has heavily influenced if not controlled the discussion of America’s Pakistan-India policy-thinking has hidden away such inconvenient facts, and may have thus misled our young authors entering these woods for the first time. The inevitable result of such repression has been the set of neuroses and psychoses that have beset the US-Pakistan relationship for decades on end and seem likely to continue now under President Obama.

(As for official New Delhi, its own infirmities, like allowing organized business lobbies to define and control India’s relationship with the United States, as well as its delusions of grandeur, causes it too to fail History 101 miserably, which explains the shallow depths that Indian diplomatic discussion manages to reach on the subject.)

What the Center for American Progress has to say expectedly contains contradictions that have been long seen before. For example, the authors are unable to reconcile their own explicit statements (A) and (B), revealing what a clinical psychologist might follow Gregory Bateson to identify as a classic “double-bind” leading to schizophrenia in the Pakistan-US relationship:

(A) “The United States should continue supporting and working with the Pakistani military despite strains in the relationship. The stakes are too high to walk away from Pakistan’s military establishment. Not only does most of the materiel for the US war effort in Afghanistan go through Pakistan, but the ISI is almost the exclusive source of information about international terrorist attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan.”

(B) “Pakistan’s powerful military establishment has launched four outright coups d’etat in the country’s 60-year history. And through its control of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, Pakistan’s premiere intelligence service, the military continues to carry out subtler manipulations of the political system during the periods when it has not held power directly…. The military establishment also has expanded far beyond its national security portfolio, entrenching itself in the Pakistani economy…. .The United States shares some of the blame for imbalance between military and civilian institutions in Pakistan. During the 1960s, 1980s, and since 9/11, the Pakistan military has been richly rewarded by the United States based on its status as a front-line state in the Cold War and then in the war against extremist terrorist networks. The United States has created perverse incentives by richly rewarding the Pakistani military in its promotion of unstable and insecure geopolitical situations on the other side of its borders, and then withdrawing our support if peace and stability return. The Pakistan military, meanwhile, uses the threat of India and the dispute over the Kashmir region to legitimize its leading role in Pakistan’s domestic politics and budget…. Ties between the Pakistani security establishment (or at a minimum individuals within it) and specific militant groups have not been severed. The militants that now form the core of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Army have long-standing connections and shared interests….”

What may be recommended by way of therapy?

For starters, a book created under immense adversity at an American university almost 20 years ago: Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, Edited and with an Introduction by one William E James and one Subroto Roy. (Yes, I too once was as young as these authors are now but we We may have produced a more substantial piece of work.) A prominent Pakistani author in the book thanked me for creating it because, he said, it was the first time Pakistan had been treated seriously at a Western university, not merely seen as a source of real-estate or manpower for Anglo-American interests.

Besides the book, I would, most immodestly, recommend any fraction of my subsequent publications in the field, listed alphabetically as below and all most easily available at this site.

I have always rather liked Jimmy Carter, who was President of the United States when I first went to Blacksburg from Cambridge in the summer of 1980. It astonished me, perhaps because I was naiive, to find the depth of animosity against him among my American colleagues. For example, I remember the late Wilson Schmidt (in one of several kindly gestures towards me until his untimely death) taking me to my first game of College Football — and there singing the Star Spangled Banner with the words “except Carter” added after “home of the brave”. Of course it was the time of the Iranian hostage crisis which had then seemed to be a debilitating humiliation.

Jimmy Carter will need a good biographer to assess him properly, whether now or in years to come, and he may not get one; objective historians are simply too scarce, especially perhaps in America. Certainly it was undignified of the Democratic Party not to give him any role whatsoever during the recent Convention appointing Barack Obama.

In the International Herald Tribune of September 11 2008, President Carter has said about the India-USA nuclear deal:

“different interpretations of the same pact can lead only to harsh confrontations if future decisions are made in New Delhi that contravene what has been understood in our country.”

“The agreed text of the “treaty” looks, from a legal standpoint, quite sloppily and hurriedly written ~ almost as if each side has cut and paste its own preferred terms in different places with a nod to the other side…. Through the sloppiness comes scope for different interpretations. The Americans have said: try not to test, you don’t need to, we don’t test any more, and you have to know that if you do test, this deal is over, in fact it gets reversed. We have said, okay, we won’t test, and if we do test we know it is over with you but that does not mean it is over with others. Given such sloppy diplomacy and treaty-making, the scope for mutual misunderstanding, even war, remains immense long after all the public Indian moneys have found their way into private pockets worldwide. Will a future President Jeb Bush or Chelsea Clinton send F-22 bombers to bomb India’s nuclear facilities because India has carried out a test yet declined to return American equipment? Riding a tiger is not something generally to be recommended.”

Nixon & Mao vs India

How American foreign policy did a U-turn about Communist China’s India aggression. The Government of India should publish its official history of the 1962 war.

by

SUBROTO ROY

First published in The Sunday Statesman, Jan 6 2008, The Statesman Jan 7 2008

Editorial Page Special Article

THE 1972-74 conversations between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on one hand and Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping on the other, especially about India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, have been public for a few years now. They make disturbing reading for Indians and Bangladeshis, and for Pakistanis too who may be concerned about the political health of their country. Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s debauched military dictator, made the Nixon-Mao meeting possible and received much praise from Zhou and support from Nixon and Kissinger. Pakistan’s official assessment of Yahya following the 1971 military defeat and secession of Bangladesh was far more candid and truthful, giving the lie to the praise bestowed upon him by Nixon and Zhou in their conversation.

Nixon and Kissinger were decidedly second-rate intellects in political power who believed themselves first-rate ~ a dangerous circumstance. Their policy caused Chiang Kaishek’s Republic of China to be expelled from the UN, its veto-wielding seat taken by Mao’s People’s Republic. The Government of India, under influence of communist sympathisers like Krishna Menon, KM Pannikar, KPS Menon et al, had been pleading the same case at the UN since 1949/1950, rebuffed each time by American veto. Now Nixon and Kissinger yielded to the idea to the delight of Mao-Zhou, and ganged up with Pakistan’s military against democratic India and the new Bangladesh.

Nixon went to Beijing at a time the catastrophic American involvement in Vietnam had reached a peak ~ something that itself was an outcome of the Dulles-Nixon doctrine of a “domino effect” in South East Asia. The Americans failed to comprehend Vietnamese nationalism against France or recognise how that had been historically directed at imperial China. Nixon’s carpet-bombing of Cambodia in needless extension of the Vietnam conflict was to cause the rise to power of Pol Pot and his vicious Khmer Rouge (to remove whom Vietnam attacked, causing China to attack Vietnam in 1979).

Nixon was in Beijing in February 1972 ostensibly to seek Chinese cooperation in ending the Vietnam War, as well as opening an Eastern Front in the Cold War against the USSR. Nixon fancied himself a Metternich-like statesman whose wisdom and brilliance would redesign the international order for a century. What was plain to unsentimental observers was that his underlying purpose was greedy and hardly statesmanlike, namely, winning re-election in November 1972 by outflanking domestic left-wing criticism using photos of having been toasted by Mao himself. That Nixon was no Machiavelli, Metternich or Bismarck but more likely just delusional and paranoid came to be revealed in his subsequent political debacle over Watergate.

The US attitude towards China’s 1959-1962 aggression against India changed drastically because of Nixon’s Beijing visit. Tibet’s people and culture had not been attacked and brutalised by Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist Army nor by India’s soldiers ~ the Mao-Zhou Communist war machine, fresh from their Korean adventures, did that. There would have been no border conflict between China and India today in 2008 if Communist China had not first invaded and occupied Tibet.

All such fundamental facts used to be perfectly clear to the Americans as to everyone else. India’s Defence Ministry’s excellent official history of the 1962 war acknowledges the vital aid sent by President Kennedy with the help of Ambassador Galbraith. Ten years later, in 1972, Nixon and Kissinger in Beijing changed all that completely and did a U-turn against India using the dubious book of a single journalist as cover for their dissimulation:

“ZHOU: …. Actually the five principles (of peaceful coexistence) were put forward by us, and Nehru agreed. But later on he didn’t implement them. In my previous discussions with Dr Kissinger, I mentioned a book by Neville Maxwell about the Indian war against us, which proves this.
NIXON: I read the book.
KISSINGER: I gave it to the President.
NIXON: I committed a faux pas ~ Dr Kissinger said it was ~ but I knew what I was doing. When Mrs Gandhi was in my office before going back, just before the outbreak of the (1971) war, I referred to that book and said it was a very interesting account of the beginning of the war between India and China. She didn’t react very favourably when I said that. (Zhou laughs)
ZHOU: Yes, but you spoke the truth. It wasn’t faux pas. Actually that event was instigated by Khrushchev. He encouraged them. In looking at 1962, the events actually began in 1959. Why did he go to Camp David? In June of that year, before he went to Camp David, he unilaterally tore up the nuclear agreements between China and the Soviet Union. And after that there were clashes between Chinese and Indian troops in the western part of Sinkiang, the Aksai Chin area. In that part of Sinkiang province there is a high plateau. The Indian-occupied territory was at the foot of the Karakorums, and the disputed territory was on the slope in between.
KISSINGER: It’s what they call Ladakh.
NIXON: They attacked up the mountains.
ZHOU: We fought them and beat them back, with many wounded. But the TASS Agency said that China had committed the aggression against India…..They just don’t want to listen to reason. Anyway, the TASS Agency account had the effect of encouraging India. And also Maxwell mentioned in the book that in 1962 the Indian Government believed what the Russians told them that we, China, would not retaliate against them. Of course we won’t send our troops outside our borders to fight against other people. We didn’t even try to expel Indian troops from the area south of the McMahon Line, which China doesn’t recognize, by force. But if (Indian) troops come up north of the McMahon Line, and come even further into Chinese territory, how is it possible for us to refrain from retaliating? We sent three open telegrams to Nehru asking him to make a public reply, but he refused. He was so discourteous; he wouldn’t even do us the courtesy of replying, so we had no choice but to drive him out. You know all the other events in the book, so I won’t describe them, but India was encouraged by the Soviet Union to attack.
NIXON: I would like to ask the Prime Minister a question with regard to Bangladesh recognition. We have delayed recognition though Britain and other countries have done so.
ZHOU: France has also recognised Bangladesh.
NIXON: Before we make a decision on that, we have tried to find the attitude of (Zulfikar Ali) Bhutto. And Bhutto indicated he does not object to recognition. In fact he could see that we would have some advantage in not leaving the field clear to the Soviet Union in that region. It is our understanding that India is supposed to withdraw all its forces from Bangladesh by the 24th of March. And based on what we have for consideration, we have for consideration the possibility of recognising Bangladesh about that time….”
“ZHOU: …. we truly wish to see (India) truly withdraw their troops in East Pakistan, now called Bangladesh. We wish to see them truly do this and not just with words. Of course they can only do that superficially, because if they get some Bengali forces to remain and join Mujibar Rahman, there would be no way to be sure because the Bengalis all look the same. But that would trouble to the future of India and Mrs Gandhi herself. The Indians said they have no territorial ambitions, but the development of events is that they have remained in their place and refused to withdraw. Once again we can only cite the events of Indian aggression in the 1962 war. At that time our troops pressed to the foothills quite close to Tezpur in Assam, and when they reached that place, Chairman Mao ordered that all troops should turn back. We turned back to the Indians ~ this is in Maxwell’s book ~ and we withdrew all troops back north of the so-called McMahon Line because one must show one can be trusted and must not wait for others to act…. India should withdraw its troops from the areas it is occupying in West Pakistan, and Pakistan should also withdraw from the lesser areas it occupies in India. Bhutto agrees. These two things, at least, the Indian side should abide by. If the US recognises Bangladesh after this situation is brought about, then we believe this would raise the prestige of the US in the United Nations.
After all, what you want is to bring about the withdrawal of all troops from Bangladesh and West Pakistan. Also, you will be able to encourage Mr Bhutto and give him some assistance. That is what they need. You said your actions should be parallel to ours, and we don’t mind that. We said this both to Yahya, the former President, and to the present President. Both of us owe something to Yahya, although he didn’t show much statesmanship in leading his country, for (bridging) the link between our two countries.
NIXON: He is a bridge.
ZHOU: We should not forget and we cannot forget, especially that Dr Kissinger was able through him to come secretly for talks here. And when a man makes a contribution to the world, we should remember him.
KISSINGER: Actually the President sent a message to Bhutto that he should treat Yahya well in retirement and we would not look favourably on any retribution. It was a personal message from Pakistan.
ZHOU: …. At the time of the ceasefire they (the Pakistanis) still had 80,000 troops in East Pakistan. It was not a situation in which they couldn’t keep fighting….. Yahya should have concentrated his troops to win a victory, and once the Indians had suffered a defeat they would have stopped because West Bengal was not very secure either. So at that time even our Vice Foreign Minister still believed they could win the war. Bhutto too…. .
KISSINGER: (Reading from a cable) Mr President, you were speaking of military shipments. We have information that the Soviet Union has shipped since November 150 tanks from Poland and 100 armored personnel carriers from Czechoslovakia. They were shipped in two ships each month in November and December. In January a third ship was to bring military equipment to India.
NIXON: To India?
KISSINGER: To India.
NIXON: The problem is to find some way that West Pakistan can find some military equipment and assistance. On our side, what we will do is to supply substantial amounts of economic assistance to West Pakistan. That would enable West Pakistan to ~ we would think in the interest of its defence ~ to acquire arms from other sources. As a matter of fact, that is the tragedy of our policy in India. We supplied almost 10 billion dollars in assistance to India in the last 20 years ~ very little was military assistance, it was economic ~ and that relieved India so it could purchase very substantial amounts of arms from the Soviet Union, and also manufacture arms. That was not our intent, but that’s what happened. With regard to our aid to India on this point ~ economic assistance ~ we are going to move in a very measured way. I am resisting considerable pressure from the public and the press to rush in and resume economic assistance at former levels. We are going to wait and see what India does with regard to the border problem and our relations generally.
ZHOU: And India actually is a bottomless hole. (Nixon laughs)
NIXON: When the Prime Minister referred to the problem India has with Bangladesh, as I look at India’s brief history, it has had enough trouble trying to digest West Bengal. If now it tries to digest East Bengal it may cause indigestion which could be massive.
ZHOU: That’s bound to be so. It is also a great pity that the daughter (Madame Gandhi) has also taken as her legacy the philosophy of her father embodied in the book Discovery of India (in English). Have you read it?
KISSINGER: He was thinking of a great India empire?
ZHOU: Yes, he was thinking of a great Indian empire ~ Malaysia, Ceylon, etc. He would probably also include our Tibet. When he was writing that book in a British prison, but one reserved for gentlemen in Darjeeling. Nehru told me himself that the prison was in Sikkim, facing the Himalayan mountains. At the time I hadn’t read the book, but my colleague Chen Yi had, and called it to my attention. He said it was precisely the spirit of India which was embodied in the book. Later on when I read it I had the same thought.
NIXON: …. Germany and Japan, received US aid…. why (they) have done so well, it is because they have qualities of drive and are willing to work hard, whereas some other countries we have helped do not have this quality. This brings me to the point: it is not the help that is provided a country that counts, it is whether the people of that country have the will to use this help. If they don’t have that, the money just goes down a rathole. A pretty good example is aid to India. (Zhou laughs)… India is not able to do much with aid because as compared with Japan, it does not have the drive, or the spirit of determination that the Japanese people have…..”

Genocide
Every Bangladeshi knows the causal role Z A Bhutto had in Pakistan’s civil war yet it is upon the word of such a man that Nixon’s recognition of their nation seemed based. The famous “Archer Blood telegram” by the American Consul-General in Dhaka reporting the genocidal Yahya-Tikka assault on East Pakistan starting March 25 1971 meant nothing to Nixon and Kissinger. Benazir retained her charm in Washington’s power circles because she was Bhutto’s daughter. Similarly, as recently as the 1999 Kargil conflict, Bill Clinton flatteringly referred to China for advice on how to deal with India and Pakistan.

Perversely enough, many in New Delhi, Kolkata etc express so much confused love for both China and the United States that they have accepted as their own the biased baseless opinions about India expressed by Nixon, Kissinger and the Communist Chinese. They would do well to read instead the Defence Ministry’s excellently researched historical account of the 1962 war, which the Government of India should not only publish properly at once but have translated into Mandarin as well.

Dr Manmohan Singh has as recently as 29 November 2007 expressed the opinion: “The type of leadership that China has produced since the days of Deng, I think, is the greatest asset that China has”. Dr Singh might have said, but did not, that China’s greatest asset has been in fact the preservation of Confucian values despite decades of communist tyranny and destruction. With such deep misapprehension about post-1949 China on the part of India’s present Head of Government, it may be unlikely that New Delhi or Kolkata acquires a realistic view of our neighbour or of a healthy China-India relationship in the 21st Century.

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